SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Hungry Dark

  Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

  War Stories

  Changeling

  Also From Cohesion Press

  Horror:

  SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

  – eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding

  The Gate Theory – Kaaron Warren

  Carnies – Martin Livings

  Sci-Fi/Thriller:

  Valkeryn 2 – Greig Beck

  Crime:

  Ronnie and Rita – Deborah Sheldon

  Family:

  Magoo Who? – Anne Carmichael

  May I Be Frank? – Anne Carmichael

  Coming Soon From Cohesion Press

  SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

  SNAFU II: Survival of the Fittest

  Dark Waters – Deborah Sheldon

  Guardian of the Sky Realms – Gerry Huntman

  Blurring the Line – ed. Marty Young

  SNAFU: Heroes

  An Anthology of Military Horror

  Edited by

  Geoff Brown

  and

  Amanda J Spedding

  Cohesion Press

  2014

  SNAFU: Heroes

  An Anthology of Military Horror

  Geoff Brown and Amanda J Spedding (eds)

  ISBN

  Kindle: 978-0-9925581-3-0

  Anthology © Cohesion Press 2014

  Stories © Individual Authors

  Cover Art © Dean Samed/Conzpiracy Digital Arts

  Proofeading by Sarah Bentvelzen

  Internal Layout by Cohesion Editing and Proofreading

  Set in Palatino Linotype

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cohesion Press

  Bendigo

  Australia

  www.cohesionpress.com

  The Hungry Dark

  A Templar Chronicles Mission

  Joseph Nassise

  CHAPTER ONE

  The body lay unmoving in the middle of the street, partially covered by the inch or so of snow that had been falling since the sun set half an hour before. The lights of the SUV made it easy to see that the body was that of an adult male in dark clothing. The shadows looming over it, however, never mind the snow, made it difficult to make out any further details.

  Knight Commander Cade Williams, the man in charge of that evening’s operation, slowly brought the vehicle to a halt a couple of car lengths away from the corpse. He stared through the windshield at the lightly falling snow on the body, then turned his attention to the two-storey buildings looming on either side of the street.

  In the seat beside him, his executive officer, Master Sergeant Matthew Riley, was doing the same.

  “What do you think?” Riley said, his usually deep and boisterous voice oddly hushed in the still confines of the car, almost as if he were afraid someone, or something, might overhear them.

  Cade didn’t blame him; he’d started getting the creeps the minute they’d driven into town.

  “Can’t just leave him there,” he said, his attention still on the buildings around them, watching for movement or some other tell-tale sign that they were occupied. “He might not be dead, just injured.” Besides, there isn’t any room to drive around him, even if I wanted to.

  The village streets were narrow enough as they were; never mind with a body in the middle of them. There was no way to get around the body unless they moved it.

  Which might be just what those who put the body there are counting on.

  “Look alive. We don’t know what’s out there waiting for us...” he said, as he opened the door and cautiously stepped out. The others followed suit.

  All four were members of the Holy Order of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon, also known as the Knights Templar. Contrary to popular belief, the Order had not been destroyed at the hands of the king of France when he’d burned Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the stake in 1314, but instead had gone underground, hidden away, its members biding their time and waiting for the right opportunity. Resurrected as a secret combat arm of the Vatican in the closing days of World War One, the Order’s primary purpose was to protect mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. There were thousands of members worldwide, organized into local commanderies and led by a Preceptor that reported to the Seneschal at the Order’s ancestral home in Rosslyn, Scotland. Despite its size, the Order operated in secret, preferring to carry out its mission from the shadows themselves; fighting the darkness with nothing more than their wits, their skill, and their faith to protect them.

  Cade was head of the Echo Team, the most elite of the Templar combat units, and the three men with him – Sean Duncan, Nick Olsen, and Matthew Riley – made up the command squad of his unit. While Olsen and Riley were seasoned combat veterans, having worked with Williams for several years, Duncan was a relative newcomer to the group, having transferred to the team from the Preceptor’s security detail a few months before. So far, though, despite his occasional need to be a stickler over the rules, he’d proven his worth to the unit and Cade was glad to have him.

  The men had been at the Order’s headquarters in Rosslyn, Scotland, training a new class of recruits, when they’d been summoned to action. Reports of strange creatures and unusual behavior had been occurring for about a week near the remote village of Durbandorf, in the northern Black Forest region of Germany. The local parish priest had finally had enough and made a formal report to his bishop, noting that he, himself, had seen things he couldn’t fully explain. Such reports were monitored as a matter of course by the Order and the decision had been made to send a team to check things out.

  Normally Cade would have assigned one of the local squads to handle it, but after two weeks he’d had his fill of training exercises. He was itching to get back into the field and this provided the perfect excuse for him and his team to do so. Forty-five minutes after the order had been handed down, the foursome was on a plane bound for Baden-Baden, Germany. They’d picked up a rental SUV at the airport and then driven north, into the heart of the Black Forest.

  Durbandorf sat at the end of a long road surrounded by forest, a small isolated outpost with a population of just over three hundred in the midst of primeval territory. At least it seemed that way to Cade; the ancient pines looming over the road made it feel more like a rite of passage than a byway that saw regular use.

  The feeling hadn’t dissipated when they’d arrived in town, either. In fact, it had gotten worse. The streets were narrow, with barely enough room for the big SUV alone, never mind two vehicles going in opposite directions. The buildings were tucked in close, not only to the edge of the street but to each other as well, giving them a sense of malevolence rather than welcome, as if they were crowding in upon a visitor with claustrophobic abandon.

  They’d entered the village less than ten minutes ago and already they had a body to contend with. It wasn’t a good sign, by anyone’s reckoning.

  Cade had a hunch things were going to get significantly worse before they got better.

  He gently shut the car door behind him and paused to pull his HK Mark 23 from the holster he wore beneath his heavy coat. The .45 caliber pistol had enough stopping power to drop a bear dead in its tracks. Cade really hoped he wasn’t going to need it.

  The buildi
ngs around them were silent and, for the most part, dark. A few lights shone here and there down the length of the street, but there were far fewer of them than he would have expected. It was only shortly after dinner time; the place should still be humming along like a well-oiled machine instead of being dark and seemingly deserted.

  Where was everyone?

  Beside him, Riley racked a shell into the Mossberg combat shotgun he was carrying. The sound seemed unusually loud in the surrounding silence. When Cade glanced over, the big master sergeant met his gaze and nodded grimly. Apparently he was feeling the strangeness of the place, too.

  Cade stepped forward and the others fell into position behind him, with Riley standing watch at his back and the other two facing outward toward the buildings around them with their HK MP5 submachine guns at the ready.

  Wanting to blend in with the populace once they arrived on site, the team had dressed down for the mission, forgoing their usual SWAT-styled uniforms in favor of heavy pea coats worn over jeans and sweaters, the latter big enough to hide the ballistics vests they wore underneath. The swords each man habitually carried, given to them on the night of their investiture into the Order, were still in the vehicle for the time being. They’d retrieve them if and when necessary.

  Cade knelt beside the body and knew immediately that the man was dead. The exit wound in the back of the man’s skull was all the proof he needed.

  He brushed the snow off the man’s back with one gloved hand, uncovering the fact that, whoever he was, he was clad only in a long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans. He had no sweater, no coat; nothing to ward off the cold that had settled about the town like a thick winter cloak.

  That’s weird.

  Cade didn’t see any tracks to indicate that the man had been dragged to his current position, which made him think that he’d come out into the street of his own accord before being gunned down from close range.

  Who comes outside in twenty degree weather in just their shirt sleeves?

  Slipping his hands beneath the torso of the corpse, he flipped the body over onto its back, only to jerk back in surprise. The man’s chest was torn open along the sternum, the broken ribs on either side sticking up into the light with casual indifference. The man’s eyes were locked open in death and ice crystals were starting to form over them. Given the fact that it was barely twenty degrees out meant that he couldn’t have been outside too long; maybe a half-hour was Cade’s guess.

  “What the hell?” Cade muttered.

  The injury to his chest was bad enough, never mind the round bullet hole in the center of the man’s forehead, but the fact that the pavement beneath the body was completely free of blood put the whole thing into the surreal category.

  How do you rip open a man’s chest and keep him from bleeding all over the place?

  Logical answer?

  You don’t.

  He was about to start going through the man’s pockets, see if there was anything on his person that might identify who he’d been, when Olsen’s voice interrupted him.

  “We’ve got company, boss.”

  Both Riley and Cade turned at the sound, then followed their teammate’s pointing figure to where someone was standing in the middle of the street about twenty yards behind them.

  The distance and the thick parka the figure wore made it difficult to tell if it was a man or a woman, but if Cade had to guess he would have picked the former. Something about the man’s stance, or perhaps his utter stillness, set the alarm bells ringing in Cade’s head.

  Something was wrong here.

  Cade moved forward until he stood near the rear of the SUV, slightly ahead of his three companions.

  “Hello?” he called. The figure didn’t verbally respond, but he began shuffling forward with an unsteady gait, clearly favoring his right leg.

  “Hello?” Cade called again. “Are you all right?”

  The figure kept coming.

  By now the other three Templars had gotten a good look at the state of the corpse lying in front of their vehicle and knew that something wasn’t right in Denmark. They formed up behind Cade, their attention on the slowly advancing newcomer.

  Cade focused on the other man’s injury. From a distance it was hard to tell what was wrong, but as the figure drew closer things became clearer and eventually Cade could see that the man’s right leg was broken just below the knee, the foot twisted at such an unnatural angle that it was pointing nearly in the opposite direction.

  The pain had to be incredible.

  And yet he’s on his feet. On his feet and moving toward us...

  Those internal alarm bells were clanging full bore by now and Cade’s grip on his pistol tightened. As his arm came up, pistol in hand, the figure ahead of him abruptly stopped.

  Twenty, maybe twenty-five feet, separated them at this point and from that distance Cade was able to get a much better look at the man standing opposite him. The man’s face was gaunt to the point of starvation, the skin stretched tight as a drum over the bones beneath, making it full of flat plains and sharp angles. His eyes were sunk deep in his skull, the tissue around them stained as dark as midnight. He resembled nothing so much as a plague victim straight out of the Dark Ages and Cade was instantly certain that he didn’t want the man to come even a foot closer.

  “That’s far enough,” Cade called out, the muzzle of his gun now firmly centered on the man’s head. “Now identify yourself.”

  Slowly, the man’s mouth came open.

  In the next moment the slim hope Cade had that the man might actually cooperate with them was dashed as a horrible shrieking cry issued from the man’s gaping mouth.

  The sound itself was a physical assault, clamping around Cade’s guts like a vice and sending a wave of fear sliding through the bones of his six foot frame that was nothing but pure, primal reaction to the sound, as if his body remembered something from man’s distant past that his mind did not. It instinctively made Cade want to turn heel and run, to get as far away from the sound as he possibly could.

  Thankfully, Cade had long since stopped listening to any instinct that had him acting like a frightened rabbit; he was a Templar and the things he faced in service to the Order could make grown men weep just from the sheer sight of them. If he’d reacted to every horrific sight and sound he’d encountered, on duty or off, his time on the Echo Team would have ended long since.

  It was a good thing, too, for the figure standing in front of him, the thing that had once been a man but was now both something more and something less, chose that moment to come rushing toward him with a speed that belied the injury to his leg. One second he was standing there shrieking and in the next he’d reduced the distance between them by nearly a third. Another few moments and he would be right on top of them.

  Nothing human moved that fast, certainly not with that type of injury. Cade didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger of the weapon in his hand. But as the crack of his pistol filled the night air, the head of the creature before him slipped sideways on a suddenly elongated neck and the shot whipped past, missing its mark.

  Thankfully Cade wasn’t the only one reacting to the thing’s hideous cry or its unnatural speed. Riley’s Mossberg went off nearly simultaneously with Olsen’s MP5, the roar of their weapons so close behind Cade’s that they sounded almost like an echo. The kinetic impact of their rounds knocked the creature clear off its feet while blasting chunks of flesh from its form. Riley’s shotgun was particularly devastating, striking the oncoming figure close to the hip and separating its already injured leg right from its body in a bloody blast of gore.

  For a moment no one moved, their gazes locked squarely on the body of the thing lying on the ground in front of them as its blood stained the snow a dark hue.

  “Is it dead?” Olsen asked, in a hushed tone.

  As if in answer the thing’s head suddenly rose up on its stalk-like neck and howled at them.

  The bark of Cade’s pistol sounded again.

  This time he
didn’t miss; the bullet slammed into the creature’s forehead and splashed the back of its skull across the ground behind it in a wet arc.

  Cade wasn’t about to take any chances. He turned to Riley, told him to keep his eye on the creature, and then marched over to the SUV. Reaching into the backseat he grabbed his sword case and flipped it open. Inside, nestled on a bed of black silk, sat the sword he’d been given at his investiture ceremony when he’d become a Templar. The blade had been forged by the Order’s swordsmiths and consecrated at a special Mass before it had come into his hands. It had served him well through the years; it would do the same tonight.

  Cade walked back over to the where the other three men stood, their weapons pointed at the monster’s corpse. Despite losing a limb and taking a bullet through the skull, the body was still twitching spasmodically. Cade approached cautiously; if it was still moving, it was still a source of potential danger. When Cade was within reach he struck out with his blade and slashed through the thing’s strangely elongated neck, severing the head.

  Rather than turning away, Cade watched and waited some more.

  For a long moment nothing happened.

  “What are you looking...” Duncan began to say, but Cade cut him off with a raised finger and a quiet, “Shhh.”

  The severed head twitched.

  Duncan recoiled in surprise but Cade had been waiting for that very thing. He gripped his sword in both hands, blade pointed downward, and as the head moved a second time he brought his hands up over his head, preparing to strike.

  “Be ready,” he whispered to the others.

  No sooner had the words left his lips than something shot out of the gaping hole in the back of the corpse’s skull. Cade struck instantly, driving his sword downward as fast as he could, piercing the many-legged thing’s chitinous exoskeleton and pinning it to the ground.